The UK Austerity Model Is Hurting the Poor and Aggravating the Gap Between the Haves and Have-nots

by Robert Wilkinson

Well, it turns out the US is not number one in wealth disparity! Thanks to a friend of the site, this article came across my desk. It seems the entire western financial model hurts a whole lot of people while benefiting a few rich ones, with the UK leading the way!

From the excellent blog SCRIPTONITE DAILY we read an article titled Wealth Inequality in UK Now Equal to Nigeria, UN Report where it states “According to the UN Human Development Report 2013, the UK has become the most unequal nation in the developed world (from 4th in 2012.) The gap between rich and poor in UK society has risen sharply during the leadership of the Coalition government and is now equal to Nigeria, with the poorest here living on roughly the same as their counterparts in Hungary and Korea.”

Here’s more from the story. Among the key findings:

1. The UK’s poorest 40% share in just 14.6% of the national wealth – the only country performing worse was Russia.

2. The richest 20% have incomes more than ten times as high as the bottom 20%, this is the same as Nigeria, and worse than Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and twice as bad as Sri Lanka and Ethiopia.

3.The average per capita income of the poorest fifth of the UK is 32% lower than equivalent in US and the Netherlands.

4. Inequality in the UK has risen sharply since 1991, when the country sat around the middle of the table.

5. As inequality in the UK has risen, intergenerational mobility (children ‘doing better’ than their parents) has also declined.

6. The majority of working people have had little or no wage increases in recent decades, while the top earners have seen substantial increases.

The report links the recent acceleration in rising inequality to austerity, but as the rise started well before austerity the report implicitly calls out neoliberalism itself by holding the key policies of neoliberalism responsible. These policies force down wages, weaken collective bargaining rights of working people, remove social support to balance the failures of capitalism, weaken or remove regulations and legislation governing price controls on core services such as transport, accommodation, food and energy – meanwhile allowing excessive pay rises for top percentile jobs, regardless of social value or added or how these salaries were procured.

The Human Development Report is yet more conclusive evidence that Thatcher’s neoliberal idea of the ‘trickle down effect’ (that a minority becoming super wealthy benefits us all) is nothing more than a fairy tale to keep the paupers quiet. American writer and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck once wrote: “Socialism never took off in America because the poor view themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”

The article also offers us this chilling assessment:

What this report and others before it demonstrate is that the rich aren’t getting richer while the poor get poorer, the rich are getting richer by the poor getting poorer. Wage cuts, price hikes; human welfare cut, corporate welfare hikes; civil liberties cuts, police power hikes.

We are playing in a casino where the house always wins. The myriad losing players are blamed for not playing hard or smart enough, while upstairs the confiscated wealth of all those losing parties is spewing from a wall in the VIP room full of over indulged, never exerted owners. The worst part of it all is even if one of those players in the casino does win ... they merely enter the VIP room and become a member of this exploitative class themselves. There is no victory for humanity, only safe harbour for a single human.

Please check out the rest of the article. It is extremely well written, and calls out the hypocritical lying politicians who preach the gospel of self-reliance but come from very cushy backgrounds. It seems privilege is hereditary, and the rest of us can eat stone soup.

Though some of the information comes from a while ago, the author has attempted to connect the dots to what's going on right now. There are several links for those who want to learn more, or be an activist in some way, whether through community gardens, alternative banking, or other ways to check out of this exploitive economic system and do our part to make a better world. What we have now, where the banksters and politically privileged classes are making life miserable for everyone, is unsustainable.

Comments

it's hardly surprising though disgraceful none the less. it's time for the masses to wake up and smell their imported, overpriced coffee (or the cheap, nasty, chemical-induced variety us "have-nots" have to resort to in the absence of a free and equal society / wealth distribution, solely aimed at keeping us in the role of controlled and subservient sheep...

You can see this development in Sweden too - the rich getting richer. But it all started back in 1980..it suddenly became important with profit, and the wages are being held down. The companies starts to get more profit. Political decisions. Well you can see this happen in the whole Europe.

Ditto to utrika down here in Aus, not only is the gap getting bigger, those who were once in the middle are now spiralling down to where they, like many of us down here never thought was possible, many of us have been hard working good folk all our lives, that is not to say some down here arent bitter and twisted its just not the majority as most would be led to believe. It is now very top heavy and those of us good folk at the bottom, the foundations that have born the brunt of the top passing on down the "debt" or loss are no longer able or willing to be there, we are moving aside so we dont get crushed in that enormously top heavy fall. We have been doing our best to let them know up there and in the middle, yet we have been stomped on and abused for that gift of foresight. We will be fine, we are well accustomed to making the most from the little we have and are grateful for it, we will help them learn this too, once they have finished their fall onto the harsh reality at ground level now that us cushions choose not to be there :) It is perhaps a tough time ahead for many, those who already had it tough, need not fear anything, they have been confronted by those fears and survived, they/we are still here and working through our debt, not only money, karmic also, there is always hope. Healing is just as contageous as disease. The first tower dropped back in 2007 as warned by the atrocity of 9/11, the second is about to go,those who are wise through experience will move aside and not succumb to the dramatic more far reaching fall out, many of us have noted that not good possibity yet direct our power driven energy to the aim that is good, which is possible if one believes it to be.

PS it is my belief that there are just as many, if not more, sheep in wolves clothing as there are wolves in sheep's yet there humility has enabled them to remain hidden, the good they have done will also be revealed, the revelations in this time space are not only not good...its that we have not been trained to see good for such a long time...

Thanks, Robert for this. I'm a Pom living in Australia. I saw the writing on the wall 5 years' ago and so came out here.

The lie is, that it's your own hard work and grit that will get you 'up to the top' in life. It won't in a capitalist system where the credo is to exploit other people and grow your company's profit for the sake of making profit(ethos of the cancer cell). Old boys' and girls' network.

Chinless wonders begetting more chinless wonders, who would only know if a London bus went up them if another passenger rang the bell, are running the show.

Aneurin Bevin, who didn't have a formal education, and Abraham Lincoln, ditto, would be turning in their graves. We have to start thinking in terms of what we bring to the world, not in terms of what we can steal from it and then sell on, whilst congratulating ourselves on how clever we are. In the meantime, the NHS is being sold off and we are going back to the world of Dickens and the workhouse.